I’ve been frantically programming and working on no less than 5 projects in parallel in my non 8-5 day-job hours. The new games are coming fast and I’m having a blast trying out new ideas. But I’m always hitting the wall when it comes to assets or ui design. I’m great at proving a concept quickly, but then my attention can fizzle as the details drag out. Historically I’ve done all my own assets, (and it shows).

But recently I took a stab at UpWork and for one small project to ‘revamp’ my ui, a great UI/UX designer helped me really make the app stand out. This was on 8’s wild, he then helped me with 11s Up which is getting ready for a major refresh (Version 3) as well.

With the success of that, I now am not waiting til the end of a project and am trying out new ideas and working with more artists. I currently am working with 4 artists on 2 projects, so 2 for each goal. This is giving me a way to try people out and see different opinions for the same problem. I’m getting impressed with some of the interpretations of my ideas, but I’m also learning that I may need to provide more hints to them at the start of the project. But to be fair I wanted to see what they could do with limited input to see if they could come up with something beyond what I can imagine.

In the middle of this experiment, but so far I’m really happy with the opportunities UpWork has given me as a developer to free up my time focus on code and use a worldwide pool of talent to help me out at a budget I can set. It’s not a completely cheap exercise but it’s saving me a lot of time and the results 50% of the time are above and beyond and that’s worth it.

Some before / After views of the games above.

As well as those I have some new ideas that don’t even have games ready I have artists helping me flesh out. Very exciting. Now if I can get the ios 14.5 releases done this weekend I probably won’t be waking up at 2:30am to blog post.